Letter to the editor: Barbara Daniels

By providing a conduit to offshore markets, the Mountain Valley Pipeline would raise the price of gas exponentially, creating an untenable burden for ratepayers. Though loudly proclaimed by our fossil-fuel-connected politicians to be “in the National interest” the MVP would also enable fracking. Fracking creates a myriad of other problems: 

For decades our under-financed and understaffed Department of Health and DEP have been unable to effectively oversee fossil-fuel activities–and the gutting of US EPA oil and gas rules promotes fracking. The Halliburton Loophole, where radioactive and toxic frack waste must all be classified as NON-hazardous, has been responsible for poisoning WV drinking water sources since the early 2000s.

Yet, touted by industry as a job-producer, according to the Ohio River Valley Institute, in the most heavily fracked county in West Virginia, Wetzel, the oil and gas promise of jobs never materialized.

Meanwhile, a recent study conducted by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) states that one fracked drilling site deploys harmful chemicals sufficient “to contaminate more than 100 billion gallons of drinking water to unsafe levels … more than 10 times as much water as the entire state of New York uses in a single day.” These chemicals can be so dangerous that frack cleanup crews report sores covering legs and soles burnt off boots.

Moreover, extraordinarily generous fossil-fuel subsidies hide the true cost of fracking wherein average well production declines by 60% in the first year, according to a Bloomberg report. So needing more of these costly wells to maintain output, polluting and destructive drilling continues with taxpayer dollars! And while fracking created only a few jobs in Appalachia, most of them no longer exist.

For such reasons, in October of 2016, the Pennsylvania Medical Society called for a moratorium on new shale gas drilling and hydraulic fracturing, stating that “growing evidence has shown [fracking’s] increasing deleterious effects outweigh any economic benefit.”

However, the US Forest Service is proposing a 125‘-wide, 3.5 miles, bulldozed MVP route through the Jefferson National Forest, a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. Comments are due by 2/21/23.